No Silver/No Gold

Sub Pop; 2003

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The barn's empty and sinking. You see the sky through pauses in the roof; otherwise the wind's muffled. There's bird shit everywhere, and you begin gathering it with your feet into a single pile. You notice that when shit mixes with dust it looks like flour on wet dough. Next you recline across two rusted lawn chairs, unwinding. You sip lemon water and listen to the sky for airplanes taking off and landing: they follow twisting plots, surprising arcs, and pause where they can, rest a while, ascend. Then there's a sound you thought existed only at night in the suburbs, when it's completely still and all you can hear is the hum of the freeway in the distance.

My friend has a theory of non-perfect beauty. In her mind, it's worth getting obsessed over uneven teeth, weak coffee in roadside cafes, unintentionally lopsided bangs, sweaters with holes held together by safety pins. The above, I guess, is my application of her theory, but it's also a response to the Baptist Generals, a band who embodies broke-ass gorgeousness in the form of a rowdy soul-sickness not easy to fake. In the world of these four weary Denton, TX guys who buy their equipment at pawnshops, people want things so badly they chase after them until their feet are bloody stumps. Or they pack their one bag then forget to run at all, as if mired deep to the knees in a Southern Gothic dream.

The Baptist Generals have been recording in one form or another since 1998. No Silver/No Gold, their debut LP for Sub Pop, is hinged together with a claustrophobic insularity I remember detailed so fully on The Grifters' brilliant One Sock Missing, and rarely after that. The music is fragile and spiritual, sodden and boisterous. It's as if the players are seeking out loosely sewn faultlines while trying to balance decay and redemption and to escape a permanent rupture in either direction.

Recorded on an eight-track in someone's garage, the album begins sparely with "Ay Distress", a hobo spiritual showcasing Chris Flemmons' cracked-up voice. His is the pained screech of an outsider, one who seemingly doesn't give a fuck about hitting notes, who instead plows around, and through his bastardized ABC's, still somehow gets the thing right, wrapping every fragment in a godly mist of tangled, slipshod estrangement. While reminiscent of the chirping yowls of Refrigerator's Allen Callaci, the closest analogue is Roky Erickson's post-breakdown solo recordings. And that's high praise.

"Ay Distress" shares the 3:00 a.m. bedroom vibe of Refrigerator's "One of Everything", the lovely opener on 1996's Anchors of Bleed. Here, in Flemmons' calloused hands, it's a lullaby to one who continually misses the song in their heart. Flemmons nails the words as they fall and spit and piss around him, but when he reaches the near-end of the rhyme, his cellphone starts singing, too. This interruption breaks the spell, pushing him into a series of real-life histrionics: extremely frustrated shouts of 'goddamn it' and 'oh-h-h-h god' (I imagine him rolling his eyes to an empty heaven). And then he throws the phone or some other inanimate junk and finally, before the tape's cut, he smashes himself against a door. Though it isn't the best way to end a lullaby, the next track, "Alcohol (Turn & Fall)", offers a solution for falling asleep when large men are tossing themselves against walls around you: turn off the light, get drunk, sweat it out.

There are so many good songs here, and each is difficult to recount by quoting lyrics or offering descriptions of certain elements. Though it's Flemmons' croon that strikes you initially, the band playing with him is equally dead-on: guitars sound like they're being snapped, the drums are shaggy-dog and really fuzzy. There seem to be buzzsaws, and the keyboards, slide guitar, and theremin are always somewhere in the distance catching breaths before chiming loudly into the general mess. The songs threaten to blow out your speakers purely with melancholy and anger.

The Baptist Generals seem to know you can't ever really return to some cleaned-up state. And, really, most of us are too poor to afford simulated perfection anyhow. So you learn to deal with your injuries, make sure they're accounted for, and if you're lucky then you find some powerful and pure way to express the things that are most fucked.